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GMGruman writes "A recent Microsoft video on OpenOffice is naively seen by some as validating the open source tool. As InfoWorld's Savio Rodrigues shows, the video is really a hatchet job on OpenOffice. But why is Microsoft so intent on damaging the FOSS desktop productivity suite, which has just a tiny market share? Rodrigues figured out the real reason by noting who Microsoft quoted to slam OpenOffice: businesses in emerging markets such as Eastern Europe that aren't already so invested in Office licenses and know-how. In other words, the customers Microsoft doesn't have yet and now fears it never will."

younger people means less MS Office users when those people grow up which means smaller market share whether by install base or brand name recognition. If I was in my teens/20's right now and I had an option for running pirated PS or GIMP I'd go with GIMP. Same with office I'd rather go and download OO right off the site then spend days trying of warez versions which could possible have infected my computer.

Some of the basic bugs and design issues in GIMP (for Windows) have me tearing my hair out.

-Disappearing mouse pointer in the save dialogue when I have to click a random area to get it to re-appear (and hope I don't press a button doing so).
-When I've selected the file type in 'Save As' that's the file type I want to save as, I shouldn't have to retype the extension.
-Restoring from the task bar or switching between windows is a buggy mess. Sometimes the GIMP window appears/goes to the front, most of

I know a lot of people in their teens or twenties who are extremely interested in, shall we say, the visual arts. They love making music videos and video editing, logo design, website design, etc. One of them is finishing up a degree in marketing degree, the other is finishing up high school now and is already accepted into a design school, another is younger than them (friends of brothers etc) yet highly interested in web development. Never has the word "GIMP" entered any of their vocabularies. Never.

OpenOffice they are familiar with its existence, which it still didn't stop them from, for example, going out and buying the Mac version of Office when they bought their cool new Macs a year or so ago despite recommendations from me that they could at least wait and get by with OO for a bit while their wallets recovered from the purchase. And I don't mean clicked the "Sure, sell me Office too!" box, I mean literally drove to the store and bought it. (I was visiting one of them at the time.)

Yes, it's anecdotal but it's also real. They don't care about ideologies; they want to use the tools they will use as professionals, and that is determined by business and not their own inclinations. So long as kids (and schools) continue to look to business to see what they should be acquainted with, businesses will have a ready-trained new workforce and little incentive to move away from what they all know.

Many of the open source tools just aren't up to par. Open Office may be for many things. I am not a serious Office user, I just do basic word processing and the like so I'm not in a position to say. It has a good interface though, so that alone puts it ahead of many.

However for a lot of programs, particularly those in the media area, they just do not compete with commercial software. I've found this in video editing. I tried to do it on Linux and just couldn't. None of the open source tools would do the tri

I went to an animation/film/design school. I know of one person who used an open source program instead of pirating or buying a student copy of the commercial packages. But he had been using it since Jr. High and is a ideologue--and even then he would admit it sucked for actual work but liked to poke at it and try to improve it in his spare time. And even he wouldn't touch Gimp with a 10 foot pole.

The thing is universities need to push more training of using open source alternatives.

The fact still remains: You will find more people who have used MS office than people who use OpenOffice. More people in the pool = less wage required to hire if you are an employer. That is where "total cost of ownership" comes from.

For example, in our university, most LAMP sysadmins are full time staff which you have to pay at least $45 - 55K per annum, while most WISA (Windows, IIS, SQL Server, ASP.NET) sysadmins are students which cost much less (somewhere between $13 - $18 an hour + tuition waiver if you are grad student).

Windows administrators are cheaper because Microsoft pursued a strategy of ensuring that there was a training infrastructure for their products. There is a whole ecosystem of books, online material and courses created by Microsoft to facilitate people learning their product. No such infrastructure exists for open source products. It may not even be possible to create such an infrastructure.

There is a whole ecosystem of books, online material and courses created by Microsoft to facilitate people learning their product. No such infrastructure exists for open source products. It may not even be possible to create such an infrastructure.

I'd be amazed to find out it's impossible for Open Source folks to create an infrastructure with books [oreilly.com], online [linuxhelp.net] material [ubuntu.com], and training [redhat.com].

For example, in our university, most LAMP sysadmins are full time staff which you have to pay at least $45 - 55K per annum, while most WISA (Windows, IIS, SQL Server, ASP.NET) sysadmins are students which cost much less (somewhere between $13 - $18 an hour + tuition waiver if you are grad student).

Somehow I have the feeling that such a full time sysadmin can give you better quality work than part-time students. If only because they know the system, they know it's specifics, and half year later if there is a problem the same person is still around to help fix it, and they likely can fix it quicker because they have the experience with the system at hand, and likely with other systems previously in their career. Troubleshooting is more art than science, so experience is king.

It is easy enough to test which one results in more support calls. Have some departments use Microsoft Office and have other departments use OpenOffice and track who asks for more help.

Thats about as unscientific as you can get. You don't take into consideration the relative use of office suites between the departments, the training and skill levels of the individuals etc. Not necessarily saying your conclusion is wrong, but even if you were to carry out such a test it really wouldn't provide a whole l

"I think depending on how you look at it, Apple has probably increased its market share over the last year or so by a point or more. And a point of market share on a number that's about 300 million is interesting. It's an interesting amount of market share, while not necessarily being as dramatic as people would think, but we're very focused in on both Apple as a competitor, and Linux as a competitor."

and

I assume we're going to see Android-based, Linux-based laptops, in addition to phones. We'll see Google more as a competitor in the desktop operating system business than we ever have before. The seams between what's a phone operating system and a PC operating system will change, and so we have ramped the investment in the client operating system.

Against Apple, what they have to fear is iWork. Honestly, the past two years I've been using iWork for 90% of my business needs and now I use it on my iPad. But what really hurt MS Office on Mac was the removal of VB Macro support. I had to keep a machine with Office 2004 just incase someone sent me an excel file with macros. The only application that MS Office still has as a killer app is PowerPoint. For presentations PowerPoint for Mac is still king in my book. I can get by with Keynote, but I still

The only application that MS Office still has as a killer app is PowerPoint. For presentations PowerPoint for Mac is still king in my book.

Really? I'm not in a position to judge, since I'm not a heavy PowerPoint/Keynote user, but my experience is the exact opposite. I use Keynote maybe 5 times a year for presentations not longer than 10-15 slides and I've found Keynote to be much better for my needs. Since I don't require any of the advanced features, the aesthetics of the default templates and the fact that keynote behaves like a Mac application are enough for me to use it. Same thing with Word/Pages. Very casual user, so the little things wo

That really is the bit that bugs me the most. Why do i need to care *what* word processor or presentation software you are using? I don't care when i read a book, or look at a report. And i create PDF presentations, and then it does not matter what i use, i can run my presentation on any machine.

The problem is lack of open document *formats*. Then anyone can use any tool they like... I don't get stuck with some word 200

The point I was making its that it *should* not *matter* what you make your presentation in. You save and you can run it on *anything*.

Right now if you don't plug your mac in at the conference or at the class. Your out of luck. And more and more conferences are demanding that the talks are uploaded onto a single computer to avoid the laptop changeover time.

And they pick the lowest common denominator. Powerpoint. Not keynote. However they do almost always allow pdf. Animations are for wimps and communi

This is highly misleading. In fact, you just wasted about 3 minutes of my time claiming that, because at first I was all "oh wow! need to get that right away". But what they do instead is host a virtual machine for you "in the cloud", and provide you with a VNC client to connect to it. Needless to say, this is 1) online only, and you really need WiFi or 3G, 2) eats bandwidth like cookies, and 3) still slow. No wonder it's rated 3 stars on the Market (with comments along the lines of all three points)! And they want $20 for that... no thanks.

If someone did a proper port of OO.org to Android (redoing the UI etc), I'd gladly pay $100 for that. But this is mostly useless.

Ahh, invest some time and learn for example following tools:
Tex/Lyx for documents, presentations, papers etc
R/ggplot2 for data manipulation, tables and plotting
Python for other things you want to compute
you get quality stuff and you never want to use any office suit again

Been there, done that. You also forgot to add that with all of these you can keep clean revision and change control.

The problem however is that you are not alone. There is usually an organisation around you which cannot be bothered. Even if you are "alone" as a lone software contractor you have customers who want to be bothered even less. On top of that you have an army of buzzword bingo players, sorry recruiters, that will not accept a CV in anything but MSF Word.

Not all people have the mindset to do programming. Actually I'd argue most people don't. I have tried TeX and it feels like programming to me. Way too big a learning curve when >95% of what I do is typing out invoices, one-page letters, and the like... even though it may give you great reports and so. If ever I have to write a report again I may consider learning TeX.

You shouldn't be using TeX unless you're a programmer. If you just want to bang out some documents, you should be using LaTeX, which is TeX, where programmers have already set up a bunch of useful macros so you can focus on what you actually want to do.

Or, LyX. I have not found a better program for typesetting scientific papers. Even emacs with the latex-preview feature installed pales in comparison. There is simply no more efficient equation editor on the market than the one built-in to LyX. Sciword i

Uhhmm... so is that the reason you went and changed the entire interface in Office 2007 to the ribbon? If anything OO preserves skill investments.

OO is basically Office97+, which was a great version. OO is just fine for the non-templated letters that pass for "Office suite" use in most offices. Not that it doesn't have better templates (and page formats, too).

Nothing to worry about. Some very brave people have Forked it and created LibreOffice to replace it. Given the more flexible source contribution rules the development rate already exceeds that of OO.org. It's only a matter of time before Oracle isn't even relevant anymore in relation to office software. It's unfortunate that they didn't accept the LibreOffice request to coordinate development and direction as it will sideline them even more. Oh well.

Sideline them... how, exactly? Seriously, this time last year Oracle didn't have an office suite and now they have a fully featured, fully developed office suite with full copyright assignment. How often does that really happen? How many fully developed office suites are there in the world, especially ones where you can buy the fully copyright to?

A few of the quotes in the article are about poor support of open source products. But Microsoft don't have very good support either. Depending on license you get limited support or have to pay per incident. You usually just end up searching the internet to solve your problem whichever product you use. So what am I paying for again?

Yeah, I've always thought about this when I hear that line from Microsoft about "poor support".

I've been working in IT for 15 years, and I've worked in a few different companies of different size and in different industries. I have never been aware of anyone getting support from Microsoft beyond searching their website knowledge base to clarify obscure error messages.

The only times I have called Microsoft for anything (or heard of anyone else doing it) was for 1 purpose: product activation. I've had copies of Windows and Office spuriously decide that they weren't legitimate, and I had to call Microsoft to get them to fix it. So the only use Microsoft's support personnel have been to me is when Microsoft broke my computer on purpose, and I had to get them to undo it.

The bottom line is whatever Microsoft says or attempts as a fear tactic, it won't make any difference whatsoever to a very large number of those consumers. They simply cannot afford Office at any price Microsoft would offer it--other than free. When you have no money, free (or theft*) is the only alternative. Given that reality, Microsoft is jousting at windmills and trying to squeeze blood from a turnip.
* Might we next be seeing not-so-subtle threats in those emerging markets about using illegal copies of Office? Betcha we will.

When I started working at my last job, we were initially using Openoffice for almost everything except for any documents that needed to go to clients, because documents that we created with Openoffice would not reliably open with the same formatting by clients who were using Microsoft office, particularly if indentation or outlining was used. Programmers such as myself did not generally need to have Office installed, since virtually all of the documents created by programmers were intended for internal only. Ultimately, however, it was realized that even documents that might initially be thought to be internal-only were often needed to be looked over by clients for review, and so eventually everybody had to install Office and use it for everything, simply so that we could compatibly communicate with the company's clients.

This is and will be true for any two different programs using non-native (more so for proprietary) formats. Word Perfect -> Word. Word -> Open Office. Even Word '97 to Word 2007. You've hit on one of the reasons that standard formats are needed.

However, if formatting is that important, consider if you should even be sending word processor documents. Maybe you should be sending PDFs for review. Or maybe you're doing something that requires desktop publishing software.

When I started working at my last job, we were initially using Openoffice for almost everything except for any documents that needed to go to clients, because documents that we created with Openoffice would not reliably open with the same formatting by clients who were using Microsoft office, particularly if indentation or outlining was used.

Unless things have changed somewhat, neither will even the same version of MS Office always show consistent formatting. If the document author is using 'printer X' and the document is opened by someone using 'printer Y', then the whole formatting can change.

If I still had an MS office install I could show you a few. Indenting, bulletting and tabulation were the biggest culprits IME. Also, page breaks tended to wander and often duplicate themselves.
OOo was a lot better at opening MS Office documents than MS Office was at OOo generated docs in MS formats.

Probably has more to do with the fact the OO adheres to the document creation standards, and MS Office doesn't. Much like MS refuses to adhere to the HTML/XML standards while every other browser does, or has +95% adherence. All that means at the end of the day is MS is creating a market by not following standards that they said they'd adhere to.

A recurring theme in the criticisms -- perhaps the most painfully misanthropic -- is that, since staff are trained to use MS Office, they simply can't figure out Open Office, and everyone who's switched back to MSO from OOO has seen support time and staff frustration drop like a rock. (Of course, going from MS Office 2k3's traditional interface to MS Office 2k8's "Ribbon" caused absolutely no confusion at all!)

But why is this? Why are people trained eat the bread and sip the MS Kool Aid so utterly helpless when faced with an alternative that doesn't look the same?

Well, it's because people with minimal computer skills teach other people with no computer skills that, in order to make this word look blue, you click this button in this place. Not "look for a color changer and select blue". No, it has to be under THIS menu, with THAT name, and looks like THIS button.

We don't teach people how to use computers or even software. We teach them very specific, contextless mundane steps.

What saddens me most is that I was able to document this twelve years ago [neu.edu] and it's still the same today.

The ONLY thing I've seen Office do better than Open Office is macros. I'm a huge D&D nerd, and HeroForge won't work with Open Office.

But that's a very specific thing, and other than that I haven't come across anything, so I just don't sue HeroForge. That isn't accurate of the general population I'm sure, and others may find faults with Open Office that I haven't, but that's just my personal experience.

However, Excel is seriously better than OO.org Spreadsheet. Especially Excel 2010. We've replaced an expensive CrystalReports report builder with Excel and everyone is super-happy. It consumes data from OLAP database, it can easily run various analyses and it's even possible to export spreadsheets using Web.

It exports _interactive_ spreadsheet. I.e. I can quickly draft a report with adjustable parameters and nice 'dashboard-like' visualization and expose it on a corporate portal in a matter of minutes. And this spreadsheet can connect to OLAP backend, using connecting user's credentials.

This is certainly not a 'trivial' feature.

I'm ambivalent about ribbon, but a lot of users like it. Besides, Word has a number of nice features, like Russian language grammar checking (Russian is a flexible language, so simple spellcheckers suck).

So then it doesn't actually do macros better. It just supports it's own document format and macros better.

I know you might consider this to be what you meant however what you typed makes it look like you believe macros to be better for some particular reason such as being faster, easier or better documented.

I've written a pretty awesome Star Fleet Battles software (sound effects, full rules) for Calc.It won't run on Microsoft Excel without changes. I can't count on all my SFB buds having Excel but I can count on having Calc on my memory stick. (it won't run well from the memory stick so I have to copy it to their hard drive-- too slow).

If the writer of the D&D utility wanted it to work, it would work. The macro languages are very similar- just not identical.

The company I work at has Office installed on everyone's computer. I generally use Excel, since that's the default for spreadsheets on my PC (too lazy/apathetic to change it). However, whenever I have to deal with some complex data, I will always use Calc. Why?

I will log a bunch of program output from my software (such as memory allocations), and I want a simple way of sorting them by file and line number, then I can see the ones that I really want. I could write a tool for this of course, but I would rather take an extra minute to do it by hand, as this doesn't come up that much. But importing arbitrary data (not comma separated but separated by words/spaces/newlines/various) is a pain in the ass in Excel. It involves saving it out as a txt file then importing. Calc will simply pop up a box asking what your delimiters are.

I've never had Calc crash on me, and I honestly don't know what the problem is. In fact, I've never seen any reason to use Office over OpenOffice. Granted, I spend more of my day in Notepad++ than Office, but still. People keep citing macros, but that just seems like an abomination to me anyway. Good riddance.

And that's not even the first time I hear Microsoft fanboys rephrase the problem as the solution.

I've had the same problem. Excel expects that a CSV file is always separated with a comma. If you use the US version. En the European version, Excel expects that a CSV file is always separated with a semicolon.

If you have a file that's not separated with the separator Excel expects, everything ends up in column A. Even if you try to import a euro-style semicolon separated file into a US version of Excel.

Thanks for pointing this out. I was wondering how so many people were bitching about this "missing" Excel feature. You can open any arbitrary text file in Excel, and yeah, it won't ask for delimiters--because it has the "Text to Columns" menu that lets you specify delimiters, fixed length fields, etc.

OpenOffice can do the same, for that matter. The two programs are pretty much equivalent in terms of that little feature.

And GIMP is every bit as good as Photoshop, if not better, right? Right?

For me? Yes, it is. For a professional graphics editor? No, absolutely not.

The difference between the comparisons is that very few people need all the features of the M$ Office suite. Very, very few people need the really advanced features in Word or Excel. Macros are one exception - and 90% of applications I've seen developed as macros should never have been developed as macros in the first place.

Macros are one exception - and 90% of applications I've seen developed as macros should never have been developed as macros in the first place.

Be that as it may, you won't get people to migrate off Office by saying "Your processes built around huge numbers of macros (which, for all its sins, broadly works) was developed in the wrong way in the first place, you must rip the whole lot out and start again".

Actually, I'd say that's true of any office suite. In a large enough company, you always wind up with someone in some department somewhere deciding they can avoid going through all the bureaucracy to get a proper system in by solving their problems with a spreadsheet, some VBA and a few formulas. Possibly some Access thrown in as well.

Six months later it's become critical to the business and the first you hear about it is when the person who threw it together's left the company and your helpdesk starts to

Which is a good point. For some reason our company has 10's of photoshop licenses, mainly for people who just resize pictures occasionally. It would be very easy to do with gimp "but it's always been done with photoshop". Probably the main reason Adobe does so little to fight against piratism - if people where accustomed to using gimp at home (due to not being able to buy photoshop) most would find it adequate. Sure there will be some who are actually requiring the features in photoshop, but not very many.

Probably because the dead-simple tasks, such as "resize an image" have always been extremely primitive and clumsy-feeling to the point of being downright broken when compared with Photoshop

Wow, if clicking on the image -> scale menu is "extremely primitive and clumsy-feeling to the point of being downright broken", then I wonder how Photoshop does it? A telepathic interface, maybe? Photoshop knows instinctively what size I want the picture to be and reshapes it without any command from me?

Your argument seems pretty desperate, like you are grasping at straws to find some shortcoming in Gimp. If you need to do it, then it seems like Gimp has improved to the point of being a serious contender to Photoshop by now. Good to know that.

It's *NOT* about being a Microsoft "shill", it's a matter of being realistic and understanding that the Open Office product doesn't *YET* measure up in terms of professional standards and needs, what people that use such products in a serious business setting need.

The problem is that 1% of the users need feature X, while a different 1% badly need feature Y, while yet another 1% find feature Z indispensable.Many people who use your logic don't realize that this seemingly insignificant 1% adds up very quickly. Plus, these 1percenters are usually the ones who are vociferous and evangelical.

I actually tried to encourage my wife to use Open Office about a year ago. She needed to do a fair bit of document editing and rewriting work, and I gave her a (fairly powerful business-grade) laptop with only Open Office installed and told her about all the virtues of open software, and how Open Office is as good as MS Office, and after a short learning curve, she will not even miss MS Office.

Mind you, she was using Open Office mainly for straight-forward document work - document editing, proof-reading, rewriting, reformatting, etc. No macros, no formulaes, no fancy stuff.

Never worked. For a brief initial period, she was fine, and even pleasantly surprised by Open Office. Then, she started finding small issues with layouts, small features that were not present, etc. Then, she started facing deadlines and small issues with her clients.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, I ended up installing Office 2007 for her, and so far, so good.

As a neutral observer, I find -this- kind of anecdotal evidence compelling, and the reason why so many Open Office proponents are simply missing the point. In a business context where everyone else is using MS Office, Open Office had better support MS Office documents to a perfect degree, and offer the same toolset that MS Office provides.

Otherwise, the only potential market will be markets (mainly government organizations) where everyone uses or is forced to use Open Office.

> Open Office had better support MS Office documents to a perfect degree, and offer the same toolset that MS Office provides.

Quite frankly, this is exactly, why OSS is always trailing and having a hard time to catch up: It needs to always do twice as much as the entrenched programs...once their own way of doing things and then, in addition, the Microsoft way of doing things. Most complaints I hear are not so much about how an Open-Source program in itself has limitations, but how it has limitations (perc

There -are- businesses which use Excel for the features. That is, they use features that are hard to use, or nonexistant in OpenOffice.

But there are -also- a lot of businesses that use Excel because, honestly, they've never honestly considered the fact that there even exists alternatives. Many of them never use formulas more advanced than basic arithmethic and perhaps SUM(..) - but nevertheless fork over the cash for Excel for their entire staff.

The former can't easily swap, but the latter could. And there's a lot of excel noobs, for every Excel guru, out there.

1. Who's going to go through every spreadsheet and make sure there's nothing too taxing in there?2. For most businesses, the cost of an Office license is really not that great. They'll spend more in man-hours learning something else and for what gain? Businesses tend to be run fairly pragmatically - they want something that works, not a religion. All your "you are being held hostage by the file format!11oneone" stuff is something most business owners will take one look at and

I abhor the use of macros in Excel because companies that use Excel usually ends up building datamining tools or some complex spreadsheets that calculate whatnot related to their business. They are usually a big mess of macros and VBA that ends up being supported by the internal IT-department and is one big headache. And just to make it more fun they can have some badly implemented Access "database" coupled to the spreadsheets.

Being able to do macros and/or script applications is usually a good thing since it can automate a lot of tedious work, and if properly implemented it wouldn't be a problem, but the majority of "applications" in Excel is just horrific in my experience. Usually someone makes something "nifty" then it spreads to the whole department and suddenly it's something that has to be supported and the feature creep sets in.

In the context of the article where it is about new businesses without any existing excel spreadsheets?

Switching from an existing solution has nothing to do with it. Any new business could use anything and have the same problems. If they start out with open source solutions then they can scale that up much better then starting with Microsoft then making the switch.

The advertising video the Microsoft released isn't about new business though (which the article refers to). Almost every quote given in that vide

In most economies some 95% of companies and at least half of all employment is in SMEs. >90% of those companies will also never use any of the advanced features MS office has, and OOo is missing. Even sharing documents (as in: opening at the same time for editing - I once tried but failed in a recent version of OOo Calc; no idea on how MS Office is doing there) is often not done.

In large businesses I wouldn't be surprised if >90% of the users doesn't use those features. They probably don't even know it exists.

Actually I think 99% or more of the Office users wouldn't be able to name a feature that does not exist in the other suite, even if you would let them use both for a year for normal work, office and home.

We have to be realistic indeed (MS seems to be): how many people know what a macro is, and how to use it? What VB script is, or how to use it?

I live in Eastern Europe, too. I process text for a living. That means I take in fairly massive numbers of documents from businesses every week. I've never seen a file arrive in native OpenOffice format. Not once. Of course, everybody could be using OpenOffice to export as.doc, but I don't think so.

The truth is simpler. As the post above notes, MS Word is still ungodly expensive here – in Microsoft's shortsightedness, during the 1990s and later, it did indeed cost several months' average salary. The

Amusingly enough, I had to switch spreadsheets to Calc from Excel because of interface scripting issues in Excel. Using Autohotkeys to script simple tasks is by and large easy, but Excel fails to queue up UI-level commands properly. Hence, "Down Down Down" sometimes is interpreted as "Down Down" or just "Down." Calc, on the other hand always interprets this as 3-downs each and every time.

While Excel's internal scripting seems fine, sometimes you just need to write a throwaway script that pulls from dispa

Once Open Office (particularly Calc) can compete with Microsoft in terms of performance, stability, and features, then and only then will Microsoft need to worry about Open Office.

I have found Calc indispensible for it allows me to cut tables from browsers and paste it into a spreadsheet, and have it import perfectly. This has been of huge value to me. This does not work at all in Excel. Furthermore, I have found Excel to be a nightmare in its insistence on being "clever" and knowing better than me what is or should be in my document: insistently turning text that it thinks looks like email and web addresses into live links (something I have never wanted in my life), destroying text it thinks looks like dates into a non-recoverable form, its apparent inability to mix numbers (as text) and numbers (as numbers) in a single spreadsheet without nightmarish manual work-arounds, etc.

I have used Excel since before it was Excel (i.e. when it was still MultiPlan) and have found long ago that it passed the point of adding value and (as with most MS products) began adding misery instead. I happily use Calc and loathe having to fire up Excel now.

Furthermore, I have found Excel to be a nightmare in its insistence on being "clever" and knowing better than me what is or should be in my document: insistently turning text that it thinks looks like email and web addresses into live links (something I have never wanted in my life)

To be fair, OpenOffice does this as well. Two weeks ago I was creating a spreadsheet of contact information. Every time I entered an email address, Calc would turn the email address into a link, change the background color to gre

Not true. For a large percentage of Microsoft's customers, MS Office 97 did everything that they needed. The only reason that these people upgraded was that people kept sending them files from newer versions of Office that they couldn't open. I worked with one company that ended up upgrading over a hundred thousand users from Office 97 about five years ago for exactly this reason - they didn't need any new features other than the ability to open files that they had been sent.

Actually, OOo already can easily replace M$O for most users. Performance and stability are already there. Features.. OOo has everything most users need. Only a very small percent need scripting capability that only M$O can provide.

I use both. OOo interface has been consistent for years. M$O changes theirs with each update. The most recent M$O is not intuitive at all and quite inconvenient to use, for me when I need to get something done. "Now where the fuck did "print" go?" or "Now where the fuck did 'save

No, you were told Oracle was bad and and their commitment to OOo is a coin flip. Libre is just a way to settle the "who will support the open source nature of the program now?" No talking points needed for bad recall abilities.

Whether or not this is obvious, there's an interesting point here. This ad will be circulated far wider than its original target market. This suggests that this will help Open Source here in the US.

Indeed, one of the key uses I have for this sort of thing is SELLING FOSS. My approach is to look at this carefully and determine how one can use it. While this is less useful than the old Get the Facts campaign, it does provide some fodder for FOSS consultants. First, the fact that Microsoft is attacking it is significant. Secondly, the problems discussed are real ones for some customers. Understanding the problems and how to avoid them is key to make a migration work. Saying "don't let this happen to you. Use MY services!" is a very powerful thing.

Moreover it addresses a number of issues, including "who will fix it?" ("I will if you pay me to!")

"I need something I can rely on. If an open source based system breaks, who's going to fix it?" -- Jeff Cimmerer, Director of Technology, Pittsford School Districts

The whole idea of Open Source is that it's open for anybody to fix it. If you've got the skills you can fix it yourself. If you're a business with a genuine interest in the FOSS you think is broken, but don't have the skills to fix it yourself, you can at least log a bug report if not hire someone to fix it for you if you consider it urgent.

Yes, you can also log bug reports with Microsoft for their software. But you're still at the mercy of Microsoft to actually get it fixed - trawl support forums about Microsoft's ClickOnce deployment system for.NET Framework 2.0 or later and you'll understand that Microsoft is quite willing to acknowledge the presence of bugs (and anti-features) and, strangely, also willing to publicly acknowledge that they have no intention of fixing them. Ever.

I've logged the same bug on Windows Find/Search since Windows NT 4.0 and yet it still isn't fixed in Windows Vista/7. (You can get search matches from unicode text files using the command line find tool, but Windows Find/Search cannot find those same matches - it only understands ASCII/ANSI test files.)

The whole idea of Open Source is that it's open for anybody to fix it.

And that's a strength. However, selling something to people on the grounds that they can pick who fixes it when it breaks may be shooting yourself in the foot.

I like the idea that an MS campaign against FOSS can be used to show FOSS has become a serious competitor. I don't think it will play out that way. If your client watches an ad by MS pointing out flaws (real or otherwise) with FOSS the most likely impact is they will now be worri

I think what he means is "I can have a Microsoft-based solution set up by any two-bit MCSE I can hire for peanuts very easily. Seriously, I can put out an advert and have more replies than I know what to do with from people who will work for relatively little. If the person I hire messes up - maybe they misconfigure something, maybe there's something odd that requires specific steps in order to work properly - I can have people queueing up outside my door to fix it within 24 hours. I just need to open the Yellow Pages and dial the first number I find in the relevant section.

I can't do that with Linux because there are nowhere near as many qualified, experienced admins. Let alone anyone who I can hire for peanuts. And don't tell me that one Linux admin can do the work of four MCSEs, I don't need the work of four MCSEs, I need the work of one."

This idea that MS will come around to fix your broken Word install is so ludicrous, so totally beside the daily reality you have to wonder how it ever got started.

When you buy from MS, you are NOT buying from IBM. Yes, when you buy from IBM you buy a large amount of support (how large? just see how many of your accounts drop dead when the bill arrives). When you buy from MS... oh wait. You DON'T. You buy from Dell and your support comes from India and is "re-boot and re-install". MS barely acknowledges sec

I was working on a site that had a Sharepoint problem and there was a bug which was reported to Microsoft and open for like 6-9 months.

This "corporate support" thing is nonsense. Some of the best support I've ever had has been on Wordpress, because you hit the forum and find someone who has had the problem before, delved into the code and worked out a fix. If I got stuck with something from Microsoft, I'd post soemthing on superuser.com or stackoverflow.com before I started talking to Microsoft.

Don't forget that MS owes its fortune to its 'educating' the western world to its products while it was an emerging computer market - but, different from today, users then had little choice - the 'first' (later, 'most popular') product out there is most likely to be learned first, a trend that led to the 'interoperability market lock' MS has over western users today. Emerging computer markets today, on the other hand, do have other choices: this is what scares MS, as if they can't use their initial

Keep in mind that when you talk about "Overpricing" in emerging markets, it's way much more than you can imagine. Down here in Argentina a Dell computer is about 3x the price of a generic machine (already assembled by your local computer tech), yet in developed countries the price is similar. An XBOX 360 or PS3 goes for almost USD 800 for the basic version (while it's not over $200 in the USA). And NO, I don't accept the "taxes" excuse. Taxes aren't really that high.

I've found windows the best platform to play WMV files and run Silverlight. There might be better software out there but windows 7 just runs this without any extra setup. Frankly it is the best for this task and you should seriously consider using it if you want to be in the *know* about these topics.

Scared is the word. From the TFA, apropos Microsoft's video ad (Silverlight or WMV if you please): "However, the quotes are far from balanced and indicate a subtle attempt to dismiss OpenOffice in the guise of a fair discussion."

That is completely wrong.

There is nothing subtle about it. Unless you consider being bludgeoned by someone screaming "Give Me All Your Money Or I'll Go Broke" subtle, that is. Pretty much every statement made in it is at best a half-truth, and more commonly an outright lie. Th

The full truth is openoffice sucks and is hardly usable for real world use.

Have you actually used OpenOffice.org in the real world? Five or six years ago, I was in the mortgage industry and I used Calc to create some pretty complicated spreadsheets such as amortization tables (including adjustable rates loans). In fact, I used such spreadsheets as a sales tool because I could show a client how much he or she could save by refinancing or the potential impact of rate changes on an ARM.

"Hardly usable for real world use"? Bah. Hyperbole not based on real world use. Is it right for every situation? No, it's not but it is sufficient for about 95% of real world users.

Meh, I used OO.org for some graphs for my master's thesis and for work. Had lots of instability with graph formatting and consistent crashes with drop-down menus a few years back. Had to struggle to manually install the latest bleeding edge OO.org (3.2 at the time) that finally addressed some of these issues... the versions packaged for my distros were a tad too old. So I understand when people knock at OO.org .

I can see where M$ is threatened by OO.org becoming the de-facto office suite, though. There's a lot of extra features (that are actually useful, like collaborative "track changes") in MS Office and some nice mail merge wizards that I still haven't seen in OO.org. But most people who do office style work have no idea how to use those features, and think I'm some kind of genius when I point out how they can simply autofilter a spreadsheet to generate different reports from one set of data.

For my part, I do little office-style work and still prefer LyX / LaTeX + gnuplot/octave + make for the occasional serious report generation I do. WYSIWYG is fine for quick and dirty, but gets very cumbersome and unmaintainable after a few chapters.

The reverse argument is that if 95% of Word customers just want quick common tasks done then it comes down which is easier.

If you don't use Word or Open Office enough to really dig into it and discover the features then the program with the more accessible UI will seem more useful.

I find Office 2007+'s hand holding and templates extremely helpful in this regard. I don't have to think about fonts or formatting I can just use the defaults which actually produce really well designed products. And since I do

I'm an average user. My office-related activities consist of writing letters, short papers, and making the occasional presentation. OO.O does all of this just fine, and I hence have no need to shell out $100 for an Office suite.

You are not alone. You are in fact a long, long way from being alone.

Depending on the geographic location, OpenOffice has been measured as being installed on between 10% and 20% of machines.

Unless you call this "tiny", the OP has it wrong.

This measured 10% to 20% share correlates quite well with the number of copies of openOffice that have been downloaded.

But how many of those OOo installs are alongside MS Office installs, rather than instead of?